Mathmouth
by plasterbrain
Summary: "Dad owned a butcher shop," I say; "I guess I walked into the cold storage one day and never came out." ShoxOC (ShOC, if you will); rated M for excessive foul language.
1. Good People Die

I was not one to deviate from the standard. Dressed in my cerulean threads, I, too, read the tabloids, too painted my nails a shade of fruity plastic, the toxic brush in one arm and my familiar Docomo the other. I, too, shopped department racks, took, and take, the word _clearance _like the bubonic plague – all those things, marked down, unwanted, on the fast track to obsolete. That being said, I begin this retelling with all the necessary components in order. A girl, dead and forgotten and on clearance, floating in her miniature cosmos; her anonymous friends, merely fodder for whatever stasis existed before it all happened; and a wolf: dangerous, scavenging, beautiful. It's enough set-up for any imminent conflict, teeth filed.

And so this horror story arrives in thick rubber boots and neon grey polyester, bandana-tied hair wild and matted and embarrassing to anyone over the age of thirty. It has a bright-sounding voice, loud, not nasally but getting there, which has a penchant for insults and trigonometry; its face is angular and feline, I think it's pretty. It tells me I'm pretty, or wants to. But before it does this, it barges in drunkenly with a revolver and laughs in our faces. We are all fifteen. We have not yet learned how to fear.

"You hectopascals!" His wings jut out like melting salad forks. "You think you have a chance at survival?" And he scans over us with palpable contempt. Akane, mousy with bright pink lips, flanking me way down here the streets of the shopping district, plays this game also. She is looking up like the rest of us are looking up, at the record store rooftop whereupon sits this week's catty Game Master, legs crossed and pleased as punch. She barks back at him,

"Hey! You're that fucking reaper in charge of things! Your missions are absolute shit! Just wait, asshole, we'll see you at the end of the week!" and her tongue and a choice finger spring out in unison, which makes the reaper laugh. I think I am holding onto Akane's free arm, suggesting we continue on to Cat Street, where our cell phones promise some arcane reward. Of course she pulls this arm out and wraps it around me.

"Anyway, gotta go, this bitch here is getting antsy. What a total bitch."

The reaper eyes me with an expression unreadable. My heart flutters for a moment when I consider it to be lust; from the moment I crossed the threshold into the Underground I had been met with all kinds of reactions, so this is not unthinkable. My vision traces the edges of his tan skin and I imagine how warm it must feel in the summer sun. This is the first time we have encountered, and yet I am already daydreaming. I'm getting worse.

"Yeah, she's an ugly little digit," he says. If you are familiar with the feeling of the casual misstep, being propelled into motion in that certain manner which summons the bowels' most irritable sensation of plummeting into the earth, such is precisely the sensation I felt, which is not unlike a piece of cheese. As he declares this, he folds his arms and looks overripe, better than anyone I've seen in the whole city. I tow Akane's arm and tell her we should definitely, _definitely _be going, but that man makes another barrier, throwing Noise for us to take care of – impossible waves of Noise – before vanishing into the summer afternoon.

There are other players prepping now, consulting their partners and getting into a defensive stance to teleport into the other plane. I try to do this with mine, and she reluctantly obliges. We enter.

"What's your deal, bitch?" says Akane. I hear her from somewhere off, fighting her own monsters. I am stuck with crabs and tadpoles and kangaroos of negative energy.

"It's nothing," I tell her. "He was just getting on my nerves." The last part of this is true. I sense Akane nodding enthusiastically, and I add, "Besides, we have a mission to take care of."

I remember first pulling out a yellow flip phone that morning to find

64 cups of Q29mZmVl  
t = 120 minutes  
Incompletes will be destroyed.

staring at me. I did not know what a _Q29mZmVl_ was, or whether or not it could be found in a cup, and evidently neither did anyone else. My own partner dismissed the message with a few choice terms and promptly sat on the pavement. Other pairs, the fourteen or so left, stared at their screens with a similar disbelief. I was good at algebra, many were, and hearing of the infamous mathematician in charge from one chatty, intrusive, red-headed reaper, had felt a flush of pride at being prepared for the challenges on the first day. When it had been some stupid system of equations. But here I was at a loss for where to start.

"Damn straight, girl," says Akane, and one of her kangaroos perishes.

Luckily there had been one stubborn kid, who blankly asked why we didn't just try reasoning this one out. That there were only so many Shibuyan landmarks featuring _cups_. A group had been sent to report back on Ramen Don first. They said the whole street was blocked off. One sugar puff in a magenta bear hoodie said it might have meant "like, totally cups of _love_," but she was dismissed vehemently. There was chatter of beverages, hot beverages, and the local coffee place. Akane and I were among those being sent to scout there.

"Take that, fucking bastards!" she continues. The Noise fizzles out and we are taken back to the Underground, the five pairs of us sent here, the sunlight harsh as ever. I hold my steady baseball bat, my however fortunate psych, in two hands. Akane takes a breath; she has never been so exhausted. "What a dickhead, sending those on us," she says. On the first day I was told, with the only emotion this girl could foster, that she and her family had moved to Japan some time ago, devout Christians – though she phrased this more like "that bastard Jesus Christ is my fucking savior," with some reverence – from somewhere in Canada, here because her dad got a job as a university professor at such-and-such institute. She had never gone out after dark, or smoked a cigarette, or left the tap running; she did not watch TV and ate only whole grains; she snacks on carrot sticks during the week. She was on honor roll. When she died prematurely, hit by a bus, she entered the Game and lost her purity as a token.

She wears her shirt low, now, so the large, wooden crucifix round her neck bounces over undersized cleavage with her strides, and I am certain she has slept with at least three other players since the start of the week. "Didn't even hurt," as she told me.

A hooded reaper in blood red lets us submerge into the Miyashita Park Underpass. The other groups run, so I pick up my feet at a suggestive pace. Akane grimaces at me and says she's too tired, though not in those exact words. So we'll walk. She flips open her cell phone and clicky-clacks away to her harem. I never realized the phones could text until she started doing so, saying "You could figure it out too if you weren't such a fucking dumbass," with a girlish wink. There's nobody I'd want to text anyway, so it doesn't matter.

I wonder if it's worth it for her to come back to life. The tunnel is dark and the cars of the living world tear past with a frightening velocity.

Suddenly, there are screams from up ahead. I have to run. I turn to tell Akane this over the smack of her now applying cherry balm, but she has already heard it too and saunters forward with the grace of a thin, injured gazelle.

At the end of the park bridge where the sprawling highway meets Cat Street's smoky retreats and sinewy alleyways, a grizzly the size of a skyscraper casts its shadow over a girl sobbing at its feet. Her partner is gone. There are 9 of us on Cat Street, soon to be 8.

"Shit!" says Akane, and not even texting has gravity over the situation. Her eyes and hands are focused on this bear, this noise, which she regards with impish fear. The other kids stare at it too; they haven't seen something this big, they had no idea that the GM would throw this at us. I grab her bracelet-covered arm and run forward, bat loosely gripped in the other hand and targeted towards static skull. Its massive fur ripples like oil in an empty sky.

We enter the battlefield, I on my side and she on hers. I hear the other players in dim chorus, saying they, also, will join the brawl for their lives. First I charge forward and feign to the roaring side, narrowly avoiding a ferocious swipe that would have torn my eyes out and dealing a charged blow to the flank. It gathers up its aura to smash my opposing body and does so with arms like great hammers. I swivel behind the thing just before its angry paws mold the concrete back into cement. I hear Akane from another plane, trying all the tricks in her sleight of hand. She has told me she holds a bible out, the same one she always carries in her Chanel bag, and exorcises the noise until their energy folds into pages. After battles, she has shown me this; the fallen line up beside the gospels like stickers, a picnic line of ant corpses.

_And I got a baseball bat_.

"The power of Christ fucking _compels _you, bitch!" she screams at the top of her lungs, while I wail on the grizzly's back as it unfastens its claws from earth. Evidently she's having trouble.

"Hold on, I've almost got it!" I hear myself say.

I leap onto its back as it rears up, which causes it to howl with beastly rage and shake me off. My legs wrap around the bear's waist to get a grip, but it wrings the rest of me wildly. I hold onto my bat as though it were my own soul and slash it randomly. _Swoosh. Swoosh. _Nothing but air being sliced apart.

_Crack._ A homerun on its cranium. Grizzly collapses with a nauseating thud and dissipates into nothing-ness. Akane goes, "What an absolute_ bastard!" _before we disappear.

Outside the J of the M, in the dead heat of August, the girl who lost her partner is still there, crouching till the tears rack her shoulders and spine, transparent. Less than ten minutes left to die. The other girl players are clucking mother hens around her, whispering their condolences and broken promises.

The timers fade away from our hands. It seems Cat's Street was the Game Master's trick after all, which makes me laugh that we could guess it.

"You totally saved us," cries a boy in blue, noticing our return. His smile is temporary, concerned, pink clouds behind an airplane. Akane struts over to him.

"We did it all for you, handsome," she says unabashedly. Somehow her arms wind around his neck already, and she's purring to him.

I approach the dying girl.

"What's your name?" I ask.

She looks up at me tearfully. _You were too late, _she says. "Yukiko," she says.

I'm not sure why I wanted to know. I as well mutter that things will be alright, for good measure, not because it means anything. Her nod is so minute I barely see it.

Freed of my partner, the dried ink of countdown, and the threat of death's precipice, I wander off in the direction of WildKat on the pretext of spending money on calories. The paint on the door is flaking, and a tiny inset window holds an OPEN sign in neon pink handwriting, framed with tacky metal decals bearing catchy slogans like "U.S. Route 66" and "Sorry, we're open!"

Entering, I find the place empty, not startlingly enough, yet the building still has the breath of life inside it, as though there are invisible people sitting in the booths. The big banner of menu hangs over the barista counter, screaming pastries and a pumpkin soup special.

There's a little bell sitting on the marble countertop, tantalizing in the fluorescent light. Next to it is a folded placard which pleasantly says, "Gone fishin'! Please ring!" Taking a seat in the first black leather barstool, I look around again to ascertain the room's apparent vacancy, then I tap it once. The silver sound rings out in a clear high note before fading away.

A moment's pause. The invisible people seem to hush and look up from their coffee, ghost talismans around their heads clattering with the envy of locusts' wings. From a hallway on the other end of the room hover the sounds of footsteps.

"Just a sec'!" says that hallway. The voice is young and rough, like stubbles on a beard. Sure enough the man is poorly shaven when I first see him, rolling up the stained sleeves of his cotton dress shirt and peering pleasantly over the rim of a pair of sunglasses. _Indoor _sunglasses. He cracks a smile at me as though we were long time friends. "Hey! Nice to see you!" he says. He triple long-jumps behind the bar and presses forward on his elbows to get a good, long look at me.

"Lemme guess… Your name starts with a… an E. Am I right? Is it an E?"

I stare back with doe's eyes. "I'd really just like some bouillabaisse please," I tell him.

"That's definitely an E face. See, I can tell. I got a lot of experience, boss. Fifty years in the business makin' big bucks. It's a good life. It's an E, right?"

"It says on the menu you sell bouillabaisse here."

"I'm just kidding. You didn't really think I was older than fifty, did you? Also I'm poor."

"_Can I get some soup please._"

"Word of advice, champ. Don't flunk out of college. Yech. Bad times." But his hands set to work on prepping a celery-colored bowl and he walks towards a bubbling pot of something warm on the back stove, ladling in some of the syrupy orange stuff loaded with mussels. He loves this moment, and takes a minute to smell the vapor of fish stew rising through the café air before returning to me. His smile is so frank when the stuff reaches my hands that I can't help but feel the same way.

"I'm joking again. Anyway, that's 580. But for you, 280. I like the E's. I'm an S, but I like the E's." I fish through my summer shorts pockets for the money and hand him three bills, but rather than taking them he extends a hand and shakes mine cordially.

"Sanae. Sanae Hanekoma. I can tell you're someone with a good story. And I know just what's wrong with you." He won't tell me what this is.

"I'm not really particularly noteworthy," I offer. Sanae only nods.

He says, "That's it, that's it exactly."

The next time I'm back on Cat Street with a seafood belly and 280¥ cheaper, everyone else is gone and only the last of the RG pedestrians filter in and out of the sidewalk. The Shibuya sun is setting somewhere behind the high rise of bigger and more business-like buildings, and here the shadows are cast as tall as strangers. Without thinking I wander daftly in the direction of the Scramble, a lost sheep. I pass under Miyashita's highway, and in the flaming orange evening, it scares me. Towa Records looms distinctly; it is the color of cowardice and has brought stars down from the sky to show on an LED screen, where its met with CAT's caricature-like scribbles. Even the usual passers by can't help looking up.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. It's the sugar puff, one of the players. Her bear hood sticks out as horrible as ever, and even its overpowering pink cannot hide her hair that's split down the middle in two salon-fresh colors. She has the face of a baby.

"Hi, like, I totally couldn't help but notice you. Are you like, looking at Towa Records? I love Towa Records. They sell records." I don't hear this, however. Her skirt looks like a living mis-painted traffic cone, a color that can match only the cheap plastic Necco Wafers on her wrists.

"I don't know. I was just staring at the building." She wraps her arm around mine and rests her head on my shoulder, brushing the platinum blonde strings out of her blue eyes.

"Totally." I sense the moment was, like, so deep.

Suddenly the most important thing in the world happens, apparently, and she tears away from me, jumping up and down, having hatched an idea.

"Let's go up to like the roof!" Rainbows begin to pour grotesquely from her eyes.

"What?"

"I've _always_ wanted to go up to the roof. Come on, I think there's like, stairs inside! Awesome!" I am pulled unwillingly through the door. It's cool and dark and musky indoors. On a better day I might have stayed in a place like this forever. A disc spinner who looks half asleep eyes us like delinquents, before Sugarpuff waves at him with her high voltage enthusiasm and begins bolting up the stairs, five steps per leap.

I am tired by the second floor, I am out of breath by the third, I am dead by the fifth and by the seventh I am crawling immensely. Sugarpuff calls me a slowpoke and assures me it's only a flight further, then resumes her star-chasing frenzy.

"Found it!" There's an unceremonious bolted metal door, with one of the bulletproof windows that don't serve much a purpose except to let the night in. She yanks on it with the muster of her ten-year-old arms, and by some god's blessing there's a satisfying unlatching and the thing clicks. "Come on, like, silly goose!" Her pink goofy shoes carry her through the doorway and onto satisfying concrete.

"Wow! It's like, so amazing up here, k!" Sugarpuff spreads her arms and twirls around in a fairy ring, giggling all the while. I worry the shop owner might see what we're up to, but the skyline grabs my attention before this can unnerve me. The sun had set during our trek through Towa, and in its place is the enormous royal blue cloak of early evening, as dulled by virtue of the blaring city lights and trumpets. There's a gentle breeze, like a spoon stirring through melted chocolate, that makes a tarp at the backs of our legs. I have to step out and immerse myself, I leap to the edge to peer over the railing, glimpse the flashing streetlights directing traffic so many stories below.

But first, I stumble on something.

And not just any something. A something hard and metal and the size of a toaster that utters a noise when my foot connects with it, the cry of a distressed

"Sine!  
Cosine!  
TANGENT!"

And then goes silent.

"Wow, like _LOL,"_ and Sugarpuff already has her kitten nose all over the artifact, which makes a covetous part of me bubble just under the skin. "It's that, like, reaper's megaphone!" I crouch down beside it and cradle it in my hands before _she_ gets to, assessing for damage and replaying the sacred message again.

"He's goin' to be like, totally lookin' for that thing, everywhere. What are you goin' to do with it?"

I remember the man in his grunge get-up and the way he stepped up to lean over the roof balcony like he meant to fall, and soon I'm balancing up on his bird's perch. The entire world is silent. I take a breath with the grace of the conductor lifting his baton. And then the fireworks roar.

"Listen up, Shibuya!" I tell them through the mouthpiece. The megaphone crackles with angry static. "Things are about to go to hell! You're looking at this week's player champion!" Japan is listening. They tune into their radios and televisions. From far off, someone turns on an apartment light switch, and the scene turns yellow in a distant window.

"What else should I say?" I mouth to Sugarpuff. She shrugs at me, and then covers her mouth to suppress an irresistible giggle. "Um.

"Hey, reapers! There's a new kid in charge now! So you better… get ready to go back to Friday night dinners at Ramen Don!" I don't know what reapers do or what's insulting to them, so I'm not really sure what to say. "Um, sine! Cosine! Tangents!" I stick my hand on my hip and burst my chest out for extra good measure, taking care that the tips of my toes aren't sticking out over the edge, and Sugar applauds.

"That, was, like, totally wicked!" she screams. "I don't like, get it, but it was totally wicked! Seriously!"

I open my lips to respond, but in that moment the drowsy haze of cold blackness folds over us like shortening. The Game Master puts a close to the day, and I realize in those last moments of fleeting consciousness that the reaper will want this back that I'll have to answer, and I don't mind so much.


	2. Top of the Third

"_A bus left the Scarlet Devil Mansion; three people boarded at the start  
At Hakugyokurou, one left and half a person boarded  
At Yakumo-san's house, two people left; so how many passengers in total?  
The answer is, the answer is, zero people, zero people  
That's because, that's because,  
There are no buses in Gensokyo!"_

- IOSYS

We're up in the Scramble Crossing, watching people walk by, speaking, traveling crosswalks, alive, flitting like diamonds. I carry a messenger bag, the one I died with, which I quickly grope in search of the megaphone: still there. I breathe a sigh of relief and simultaneous exhaustion.

Akane finds me the moment I reenter reality.

"You're up fuckin' late," she says pleasantly. "We already got the freaking shitty mission. The other assholes are halfway completing it." She shoves the screen of her glossy phone up to my nose. Stifling a yawn, I get my sleepy eyes to focus on the message displayed:

sec^2 - tan^2 + cos^2 + sin^2 = y  
y = route number  
t = 100 minutes  
Incompletes will be destroyed.

"I didn't even remember fucking trigonometry." Akane stomps off, heels clacking, and makes a pouting face. "But somebody said they did. Keiji's already off with the rest investigating Cat Street…" she half mumbles to herself, looking woeful. Keiji was one of the spitfire types, a lackluster player who assumed himself in charge and met little protest from the confused mass of dead children. I'd heard the name thrown around, though I couldn't, and can't, associate it with a face.

"Why Cat Street?" I ask.

"They fucking worked it out, dumbass." She returns to the phone, and presses the keys rapid fire to bring up a pixilated map. "We're starting at the Scramble Crossing. See Hachiko? Where that road goes off to some freaking place that's just fucking question marks?" A lonely black line goes from here to the line of bus station shops as the crow flies, then zigzags to the terminal, the Station Underpass, and disappears under a marker labeled ambiguously. "That's fucking Route 1.

"It goes around counter-clockwise, I don't freaking know why. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7." Her porcelain nails lead my eyes around the circle.

"So?"

"So?! Put two and two fucking together, bitch. The trigonometry thingy equals _2_. Route 2 is Cat Street. That's where everyone fucking went. But I had to get the shitty end of the stick and wait for my fucking bitch-face of a fuck partner to fucking wake up fuck!" She doesn't seem angry that she had to wait. Only that she couldn't be around the other male players. Her angry face is hardly genuine. Her hair frizzes from where she's been dramatically tearing at it.

I suddenly remember my hand, and the timer, and glance down to see how long I was out. The cut in my flesh reads forty minutes. Forty minutes. Of one hundred.

"They've been gone for an hour?" I say. Akane understands my concern and nods gravely. I begin to pace back and forth, roving through the mental list of possibilities: _eaten by another bear, hit by a car. Gave into existentialist temptations and resolutely abandoned all hope, decided to play a trick on us. Genuinely forgot where Cat Street is. _None of them were pleasant. "There's, what, twenty-six of them?" Again another nod, and now she's thinking too.

I pull out my own flip cell and examine it. Sure enough, the text has arrived on mine as well, unopened. The same math equation, the same time limit, the same _y = route number_

Wait a minute.

y = route number

_route number_

_**route**_

"Crap."

Akane perks up. "What?" she asks.

"Route number."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

I ask her to pull out her phone map again and go through the black lines, thinking aloud: "Route. Number. Route. Root. Root number. _As in math_. 2 is the root number. Root. Inverse of square. 2 is the square root of four." I look up. "He wants us on route four. Route four is from Spain Hill to Molco."

I never knew petite teenage girls who hardly fit in their own stilettos could scream so loud. But when her almighty expletive rings through the morning air of Shibuya, I think for a moment, perhaps, even the living world crowd will stop for a moment to listen, thinking the sound is some suffocating crow on a telephone wire.

"Come on!" I say, now the one to grab my partner's arm and charge onward to the narrow Center Street entrance. For once in her life she's willing to match my speed, aware of the sinewy thinness of our lives all the sudden in a little over thirty minutes. We pass underneath flying city district banners and advertising slogans and through the shadowed streets overcast by the tall mountains of department stores. There are girls in school uniforms arguing, whom we race by without noticing, and a man in a suit looking as though he, too, just woke up in the middle of the early afternoon on the curb of disaster. The exit isn't blocked, so we enter into AMX without obstacle. I tap into my black skull pin for a quick scan of the area.

"Blue noise!"

Akane looks serious. "Fucking leave it! We have better damn things to do!"

"Got it!" We're on our feet and sprinting to where the road takes a turn by Tipsy Tose Hall, into Spain Hill, where large panels of women in lingerie circle around above us like a flock of geese, and everything is hot and crowded and quiet. The scent of chili and beef drift through the lines of consumers and up through our nostrils. Meeting us at the end of the line is a support reaper in red. We brake in front of him. Akane is having none of it.

"Hey!" she scowls, grabbing him by the scruff of his baggy sweatshirt and pressing her face up to his so that it tilts back and she can see his startled eyes beneath his baseball cap visor. "Let us through, you fucking asshole!"

"Gimme a hot dog," he says mildly.

"Alright, yeah, bitch, I'll give _you _a mother fucking hot dog." She kicks him in the groin and bolts for the hot dog stand. I briefly mutter an apology to the guy, who is doubled over clutching his crotch.

"She's, um… She's like that," I offer. The hooded reaper doesn't look up, so I start to wander towards Mexican Hotdog, where Akane went, passing a few unmarked, charcoal-colored buildings. There are angry customers at the door, muttering about how some girl knocked them over in a rush to get something to eat. They warn me to steer clear of the cyclone chick that wrecked the place.

Inside, a few chairs have been knocked over, and whatever line there was of kids and parents here to get a Mexican hot dog has been duly scattered, giving wide berth to the angry hornet at the counter, their eyes flickering to me as I walk through the door. A solemn S.O.S.

"Make it really fucking gross, too." Akane's pressed over like a folded piece of paper so that the clerk has full view of whatever her shirt doesn't cover. "Don't even fucking cook it, bitch. I really hate this asshole. You can even through some soda on that fucker, if you want. Make it shit."

The man, a foreigner, is sputtering beyond control. In one hand is a link in a bun and in the other is a trembling bottle of ketchup. He's muttering _¡tranquila! _and nodding to whatever she says. The hot dog comes out perverted and horrid-looking and tie-dyed in condiments, and the coins she slams on the countertop are still spinning by the time she's out the door.

Akane holds the hot dog in two hands and with a grimace. "Eat up, bitch," she says. The reaper doesn't take it. He just lets the wall go. She throws it on the ground and, shoving past him, the two of us take off running into the sunshine of Molco.

I am two steps behind my partner when the wall comes _back_.

She doesn't notice, but instead runs so many more paces before missing the echo of sneakers on concrete. She turns around and notices me pounding on an invisible wall.

"Fucking _fuck! _What the hell!" Akane comes back and beats on it from the other side. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! Tell that fucking reaper to make it fucking go down again!" Her voice sounds like the inside of a glass jar. I nod, and turn in search of the wall-keeper, peering in and around the schools of shoppers and pedestrians as far as my vision down Spain Hill extends.

"He's not here."

I say it before I realize it, totally, that there's a force field between us and I'm trapped where the mission can't be done and the other 26 children are being eaten by a bear somewhere.

"What do you mean he's not fucking _there?!_" Akane's screaming and knocking on the wall only increases in intensity. "What do you fucking mean?!"

It's only then the exhaustion of sprinting all those blocks finally comes over me, my heart rate tripled and my breathing shallow and my muscles feeling as though they've been squeezed through a lemon juicer. I fall down on my sweaty knees to get a break. When you're dead, and where cars don't pass, the streets become a comfortable living room. I notice my hand. _19:19._

"Less than twenty," I tell her in ragged breaths. "Get going."

"I'm not just fucking leaving, bitch! I can't fight the noise by myself!"

"Then stay out of trouble. I'll climb the wall. But don't wait." Akane gives me the look of a suicide victim, something desperate and coarse and horrifying, when she clutches her necklace and nods. She turns around and keeps running, only looking back once, and not reassuringly. She's scared to death, but she'd never let me know it.

Left alone and slowly recovering, I take in some of the urban air and let out a wholly sigh that reaches the bottom of my lungs. It's grown silent on the Hill, slightly less dark. The sun is climbing up overhead now. Everything on my body hurts badly and I'm not sure I can move for a while. So I sit, and I watch. And a few minutes pass without action. I am too tired to be worried about them. One of the unspoken agreements of our partnership contract is that I let _her _do all the excessive worrying.

"You inverse factorials are _so_ zetta slow!"

And then my heart takes a cannonball dive for the pavement, and I lose all feeling in my midsection. My energy has collapsed and I cannot turn around before he appears in front of me in a black frenzy. The unpleasant Game Master is tall and smirking and his eyes glint in the shade.

"You monomial morons! How is it that _none_ of you could actually solve a factoring riddle as simple as the square root of 4? Hello?"

I stare at him. The smile disappears. "No, don't answer," he says. "It's irrelevant." Step forward. "Here's the real problem: You've subtracted something important from me, which is less than or equal to me taking it back." I'm hardly listening, though. I'm focused on the way his pea coat strays open towards the neck and his chest shows and his sweet silver necklace sways back and forth. I don't get up.

"You mute? You _know_ what I'm talking about, transversal." For a moment I quit daydreaming and it hits me what he's getting at. I nod and shove an arm through the top of my shoulder bag, which has sagged onto the ground like it too was taking a break, gaining foothold on the hard handle of the thing. I notice the way it presses into the renewed skin of my palm, a palm without a timer.

Akane must have completed the mission. I pull the megaphone out.

"This?" I ask, fingers tracing over the operative buttons. I press the familiar one and the Game Master's stifled voice pours out: "Sine! Cosine! Tangent!" I stare up with as innocent a look I can hold together. "Is this what you're looking for?"

"Damn straight," he says, arm extended for me to hand to him. He's standing though; he wouldn't stoop down to grab it.

"Do you want this?"

"Are you _braindead?_ Of course I zetta want it." Another step forward. I begin to feel conscious of the tight moisture of Spain Hill.

"Could you bend down and get it?" I call from my knees. "I'm tired from all that running. I'm not sure I could stand up." This bothers him the way it does the Siamese emperor, but he drops down on his haunches and holds his arm out, dead on locked with my eyes. And not smiling.

And I'm not sure why I do it. I think he's gorgeous and I want to keep a piece of him, maybe. But I gather up the last holds of explosive energy from inside me. I smile at him genuinely. And then I run.

Spain Hill was a lot longer than I remembered it. And the afternoons are hotter than the mornings. But I run, again, all the same, tired and bursting from the seams, and half-nauseated by the intoxicating smell as I pass, again, the meat store. I try not to picture the Game Master tearing after me, and for a moment, in the half emptiness of the street, I imagine he doesn't.

But then there's the wall.

The other wall. The new one. The one that keeps me apart from Tipsy Tose, with the noise grizzlies and minks and even a wooly, in the way back of the mass, forming in front of it. I backpedal a few cat steps and dodge into a nearby sudden alleyway, a tight neckline between two Spanish buildings, a narrow cobblestone hall going downhill and hung with clothes lines and bikes. I somehow hope between the chaos he hasn't seen my small form disappear. I slip the megaphone back in my bag as I gallop. A cotton dress hanging from a wire grazes the top of my head.

But then there's his laughter: loud, raucous, beautiful, frightening. It shatters Spain Hill in its entirety and chases me down this thin passageway. What starts as a few withheld snickering crackers erupts into a geyser of something terrifying, and then his boots are carrying him across stones in leaps and bounds and into my arms.

I slam into a wall and try to crumple, but his knee presses into my thigh and holds me up and nearly barreling forward onto him. One arm roughly pins mine above at the wrists, while the other hunts through the bag for his prized item. He leaves me once its returned to him, leaves me to fall on the street and bruise my knees, while he presses onto his treasure and lets out a triumphant roar.

"Learn your place, yoctogram! I won't allow for petty thieves in my Game." That's a laugh. The Game Master presses the same button and his own voice is reiterated: "Sine! Cosine! Tangent!"

"Beautiful," he purrs to the sound of it, cooing to the device and even stroking it with a coarse hand, and I can't help but agree. "Listen up, n factorial!" He stomps down to get better footing on the steep cobbled incline.

"The world is garbage! There are only two beautiful things in this world, and one of them is me!" He jerks his other thumb at his chest and laughs again, self-assured.

"You are beautiful," I say, smiling sheepishly.

The Game Master stands perfectly still, and the wind blows past him, ruffling his hair. His thumb is still out, unmoving, a stone billboard and homage to his arrogance.

Finally, he says, "I zetta like your style." Straightening himself up and unfurling his wings, he looks me in the eye. "I'll kill you tomorrow, radian!"

Then he vanishes laughing.


	3. Top of the Fourth

_Ten little Indian boys went out to dine;_

_One choked his little self and then there were nine._

_Nine little Indian boys sat up very late;_

_One overslept himself and then there were eight._

_Eight little Indian boys travelling in Devon;_

_One said he'd stay there and then there were seven._

_Seven little Indian boys chopping up sticks;_

_One chopped himself in half and then there were six._

_Six little Indian boys playing with a hive;_

_A bumblebee stung one and then there were five._

_Five little Indian boys going in for law;_

_One got in Chancery and then there were four._

_Four little Indian boys going out to sea;_

_A red herring swallowed one and then there were three._

_Three little Indian boys walking in the zoo;_

_A big bear hugged one and then there were two._

_Two Little Indian boys fooling with a gun_

_One got shot and then there was one_

_One little Indian boy left all alone;_

_He went out and hanged himself and then there were none._

"Noise," is all she says, not looking at me, but over my left shoulder. Someone had stolen my partner and left a zombie in her place. Her hair and body have gone limp, and hang like paper sacks on a hot air balloon falling out of the sky. "It was noise."

There are fourteen of us, hanging haphazardly around in a circle, and no mission yet for anybody. I study my company. Besides myself, there's Akane, her skin paling like tissue paper, and next to her a boy and a girl with the same choppy brown haircut and brash colored shorts; Sugarpuff, who's still alive, sits next to a woman in black leather with orchid lipstick; a wilting wallflower with full-moon glasses panes and that boy named Keiji are together after that; then there's an old woman I've never seen, her eyes fierce, and a punk-rock type with a black mop of hair over his face and a skull tee; a girl with bobbed hair in cotton pink and a red sweater is next to a kid who's on his knees about to cry; a spiky kid with candy in his mouth and ridiculous adventure get-up accompanies a short girl, subdued, with bushy long hair and a dark gaze that meets my own as I work around the circle. I am the first to look away.

Fourteen. Seven pairings. Which means five pairings all died in the Cat Street fiasco, because of, as Akane said, "a noise problem." In the free time we had been so strangely granted, the remaining players had done recon on the area for traps and missions. Nothing. No noise. No walls blocked. No stray monster running about Shibuya like an outbreak at the zoo. Not even a menial social problem attracting that orange, negative noise. Nothing.

While Akane hugs herself and crouches on the floor, invisible Realground people passing her by, the rest of us stand around lithely, staring each other down like the half dead victims we are, as the noise of the afternoon swallows our empty pocket whole.

The spiked kid is the first to speak up. "So what are we gunna do with a full day and no mission?" he says, his voice half an octave lower than what I'd expected.

Sugarpuff answers. "Well, it means we like, get a day off, am I right? We can go shopping and stuff?" There's a wave of groans from the rest of us. If this is how she acts in the face of plausible death, her life must have been heaps of empty Monster cans.

"Well, I'm sure as hell not staying around here." Orchid Lips takes a step to the center, _clack clack _in huge leather boots, and glares at us, arms folded. Her lids are done in a gentler mauve color. "I'm out to Dogenzaka. You in, Coco? I'm buying."

"Yay, like, ramen!" Sugarpuff is bouncing up and down. She latches onto this woman's arm and tugs her in that direction, and I try to hold back a half-hearted laugh at their overwhelming height difference.

"Wait! Ugh, you can't just go off by yourselves!" Now it's Cotton Hair's turn. "We have to be prepared for stuff! What if there's a trap?"

"But we already checked," says Spiked. "No traps."

Orchid gives her the once over. "You guys can be prepared and whatever," she says. "That's totally fine. But we're going to Dogenzaka." _Clack clack. _Halfway down the Scramble.

"Ugh! You stupid jerk!" Cotton yells. Orchid swivels around in a second, her snake eyes stinging into ours, like a gas heater inside her turned up a hundred degrees.

"Bitch!" she says.

"_Skank!"_

Keiji pulls Cotton back with all his strength. Sugarpuff – Coco – continues to hang on to her partner, screaming "No, like, fighting!" while the two girls try to charge at each other in their bull pen. I steal a glance at Akane, who is staring at the space ahead of her dully, the look of utter horror in her eyes. I reach a hand out to her and she accepts it mechanically, gratefully.

"Ezumii's r-right," Keiji finally intervenes, still restraining the struggling girl. "I think we should all go ahead - and take - the day off – _stop kicking me!_ – and if that- that means a bowl of ramen, so be it." Orchid Lips smirks, brushes herself off, and struts for Ramen Don, her fluttering partner still in tow. Cotton finally stops flailing.

"I hate ramen," she murmurs.

"Easy, girl. Don't blow a fuse."

That was how it started. We were left to ourselves to explore Shibuya for the day. For me, that meant hoping for another chance encounter the Game Master – wherever he might be – but I had Akane to worry about first. She lopes along beside me at a troubling pace. Even the old woman overcomes her in three easy steps. It's the six of us now – me, Akane, the woman and her partner in the skull tee, Spiked and the other girl, who continues to glance over at me often - having decided on a trip to Mind and Body Foods at the department store. I've never been, but the elderly lady became the leader of the group and urgently insisted on it. Plus, it's a shorter walk from the Scramble than most food places, which Akane needs.

The aisles are low and the lights are lower and the owner of the shop steps forward and regards us in turn. His face lights up when he spies the elderly woman. "Chiyo! Ah, good Chiyo!" he sighs. "It's been quiet without you stomping your fat legs around!" His eyes give off a mischievous twinkle, but Chiyo only stares back at him dryly. The man recognizes the seriousness and turns around, walking towards an unremarkable door in the back, while his gnarly hands search for a key in his apron side pocket.

"Need the lounge?" he says, flinging the door open and presenting it with his arm in an effort at showmanship. Chiyo nods and takes big strides into this room. She doesn't motion for us to follow, but one by one the rest of us tither along like ducklings. I notice the black decal present in a lot of these shops the players can use. I've begun to realize what it's for.

"It's not like you to be gone for so long, woman," says the shopkeeper, though his face seems to have aged ten years.

I don't think he realizes the woman is dead.

"Strange things have been happening," is all Chiyo says, before she shuts the door.

The room is drab green, and the paint peels a bit where the hand-me-down bureaus and couches have been moved around. A strange motley of posters covers the walls, some for bands and local events, others old professional photographs, a few with lame slogans and cartoon monkeys on them, scattered between leftover post-it notes. Most noticeable, however, is the large banner reading, "Clubhouse" in too-formal letters. Chiyo finds the nearest plush arm-chair and throws herself on top of it.

"Ayanokoji is an old friend of mine," she says with a dry, whistling voice. She sighs and settles into the plump cushions. The kid with the mop of black hair sprawls out on a couch and starts pounding death metal from his headphones, with the volume so loud the tinny echo of the sound rings out from the tips of his ears. Akane sinks down to the floor by a coffee table and seems content to stay there; I take the seat nearby, across from Chiyo. Spiked and the dark-eyed girl find the remaining two seats.

The old lady's bright blue eye pops open and sucks us all in.

"Now then. First rule of the clubhouse," she croaks: "Introductions."

Spiked laughs all over himself. "Please, you've got to be kidding me. I thought that lame banner was a leftover from when like, kids used this place."

Chiyo smiles. "It's suitable for our purposes." He stares at her incredulously and tries to shake it off.

"Toko." We turn towards the source of the sound: the bushy-haired girl is sitting erect, staring politely forward as she says it again. "Toko Marjoram. It is my name. You asked for introductions so that is what I told you." I can finally get a good look at her now that she doesn't meet my gaze; Marjoram is short and wears too many layers of dark lace. Her hair is long and fat and cropped just above her ever increasingly dark eyes and around her pudgy face, where it tunnels down into the folds of her dress. Her skin is porcelain pale and her attitude concerns me.

Chiyo claps her hands together. "See, there we go. That's one down. Who's next? We're all going to be dead together, might as well get it out now." Her gaze makes its rounds and settles on the goth kid. "Takashi! Take off your damn headphones and tell everyone who you are!" She raises her bullhorn voice over the noise of his metal. I cover my ears and wince, and this boy scrambles into sitting position and slams the headphones off his ears so they hang limp around his neck. They're glossy designer purple and cost more than my whole outfit put together, maybe Chiyo's too.

"I'm Takeshi," he says. He flashes us a peace sign before slumping back into his music. Chiyo's evidently mollified by this, and asks who's next. Spiked seems resigned not to say anything. He's puffed out his cheeks and has his legs drawn up to his chest. Marjoram continues to look forward. Akane has gotten lost in herself, curled in fetal position for entirely different reasons. She hardly seems in speaking condition.

"My partner is Akane," I offer, nudging the body with my toe. She mumbles in acknowledgement. "She's normally fully functional. I guess the whole noise thing's got her spooked."

I hear her faintly add, "damn straight." But it sounds very sad, like a dying lamb. I stoop down on the floor to look at her, but Akane buries her face into her knees and denies me.

"Well?" Chiyo's waiting for me. "And you are?"

"I was hoping the green kid would introduce himself first." I nod my head in the direction of Spiked, whose lime-colored do is beginning to deflate under its hairspray. He growls.

"Fine," he spits. "But only to you. Not to the old hag. Name's Zak Sage."

Chiyo snorts indignantly. "What a stupid name!" she bellows, slapping the arm of her loveseat with amusement.

He throws two fists down and stands up as though ready to fight her and says, "I wasn't introducing myself to you, bitch!" The old lady winks at him and speaks in a singsong voice.

"Watch what comes out of that mouth of yours, you little shit."

And that shuts Zak Sage up for a while.

Chiyo stands up grandly out of her chair and spreads her arms out wide. Her grin is toothy and I spy at least a socked handful of golden replacements among its ensemble. She is larger than life, and even Takashi slides his phones a bit to listen.

"Alright, now that Zak Snot's finished," (Zak is visibly not amused by this) "I suppose I can tell you a bit about myself." She reaches into the pockets of her trousers and I catch a thin flash of something distinctly metal before she holds two slick copper-toned pistols in the air with eerily toned elderly forceps, and her look barrels us down with ancient vigor. "Listen well, and don't forget it! I'm Chiyo!" – _bang! _– "no Tokaku!" – _bang! _ (There's stirring from outside the clubhouse room, and a flustered storekeeper shouts to keep the noise down from the other side of the door.)

"Let me guess, those are your psychs?" says a rather unaffected Marjoram. Chiyo no Tokaku now uses the weapons to gesture like a cruel and dangerously out of hand high school science teacher.

"Yep, so don't get me angry, little Missy!"

"Duly noted."

Then we hear the screaming. I'm surprised it took that long to register in her before it started. Akane next to me is looking blindly terrified and shrieking at the top of her lungs. The gunshots likely set her off, which Chiyo also apparently realizes, muttering choice obscenities to herself and putting her pistols back in their holsters. I'm not sure what to do, so I wrap my arms around my partner and whisper reassurances.

Marjoram is the only one who doesn't leave their seat, even when the door opens and Ayanokoji is standing there barking at Chiyo to _seriously stop firing randomly this is why the place is so damn empty and now some kid is screaming and please get her out of my shop._ Chiyo gets the two boys to help me carry her out the door and through the racks of protein bars to get her fresh air.

"Akane, nobody's going to get hurt, it's ok," I tell her. A brief glance at the noise field reveals that orange symbols are attacking us in droves. The old lady leads the shop keeper back to something interesting in the shop, so he doesn't see us disappear in the afternoon sunlight, dead as we are. Zak holds open the door to the thin, high chime of an unassuming bell as we drag Akane through, where she slumps down onto the sidewalk. And even then Marjoram remains back in the lounge.

I settle down beside her, even though the cement is cold and ridgey, and blanket her shoulders with my arm. It's all I can do as I see tears now streaming down her face. At least the screaming has subsided into gentle hiccups, if that's improvement.

"Akane, it's alright," I say.

Takashi gets down on her other side. I wonder how he can see through that much unkempt hair. "You into 44MAGNUM?" He offers the headphones. Zak looks around awkwardly to see if anyone's watching.

Akane just shakes her head back and forth, staring at the street. "I don't want to die." First it's just a faint wisp of air between her lips, but as she speaks it grows louder. "I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to fucking die with the fucking rest of you. I have a family. I have something to go back to. If I die here, I'm going to hell. I have to come back to life and save myself." I stare at her quizzically and try to wonder what it'd be like in her shoes. I imagine a handful of the players who'd died would be boys she'd already slept with. That'd freak me out. I've never slept with someone, but I've never been very religious, either. I thought when she lost her essence as an entrance fee she'd never really looked back, but apparently that's not the case. Though what strikes me as the strangest is how she desperately, hysterically wants to come back to life. I want to live to the end of seven days, too, but just sort of to see how they came out. I'm really only bemused by the whole thing, and figured since I've already died, that's all there is to it.

I guess there isn't much to come back to. My dad and I used to play baseball, I guess.

So I try to think of all these things when I tell her to chill out, maybe think of her family and how they're rooting for her, and I'm rooting for her, and how much easier to kill she is in the middle of a busy Shibuyan sidewalk.

It's a few minutes before she believes me. Akane looks up with wide eyes.

"Thanks," she says finally, barely more than a whisper.

"See, life's not so bad, right? I bet Chiyo and Marjoram are right behind us. Got no mission today. Maybe we can just take a walk and calm down." I'm not sure if I'm convincing her or myself to believe me. Either way, I'm running out of reasons.

"You're a damn fine partner," says Akane.

"And as long as I'm around, nothing can possibly stop us!" I'm pretty sure a high five is what friends do at this point in the conversation. "High five!" I prompt half-heartedly.

"Shit."

She leaves me hanging.

"Um, ok." I leave me hanging too. I didn't really want the high five anyway. But when I look at her, and the two boys, and the whole street around us, I realize it's not Akane who said "shit," but Zak, and he's frozen looking across the road, where two harrier reapers are surveying us with what I would deem a predatory look and start advancing closer.

That's when Akane starts screaming again.


	4. Bottom of the Fourth

"_Trichotillomania is hair loss from repeated urges to pull or twist the hair until it breaks off. Patients are unable to stop this behavior, even as their hair becomes thinner."  
_- U.S. National Library of Medicine

"I say, Koki, what do you think that is?" There stands an absolute beanpole, made taller by the extending crown of a coconut-colored gentleman's topper. He's leaning real slow against a wire-link fence and swiveling a burnt-out cigar in his teeth, and next to him, between all the rusted black gates of tangling reaper wings, is the redheaded informant from day one, a familiar self-introduced Koki Kariya I am sorry to realize looks terribly predatory upon second observation.

"Looks awful like a couple a players to me, Huck," said Koki.

"Well, I do declare, go ask them, just to be sure." At the behest of the Absolute Beanpole, Koki throws himself off the fence and saunters towards us, orange lenses glinting off the sunlight like cat's eye marbles. I nudge Akane as gently as I can and tell her to stop shouting. I can't do this alone. She obliges, though only slightly, and is content to tremble violently in my arms.

"What do you want?" says Zak. Stupid Zak. He crosses the street like a dope and rises up to Kariya's chest – Kariya, his senior by at least twelve inches and at least ten years.

"Just looking around," says the hunter. "Couldn't help but notice a couple a kids with timers and cute phones. If I remember precisely, I saw you guys loafing on day one, yeah? Only there were more of you, yeah?" He gestures with his chin over to the rest of us. "That your partner over there? The stoner in the black?"

My sneakers tap the concrete in just a second, because suddenly I am flying over towards them. And Zak Sage, whom I do not estimate to be of high pedigree, opens his trout mouth to spew the facts that would kill too many of us. I lock my arms around his body and shut him up quick. "Yeah," I answer, half out of breath. "They are. They're just going to go back and sit quietly on the curb now." Zak's fish face revolves slowly through the range of emotions before it finally registered he nearly carved his own tombstone and pissed on it. He nods and struggles free from my grasp.

"And you," turning to Koki, "are going to go back over to the fence and talk to your friend, right? And nobody's going to get hurt here, right? We're all going to be friends."

The fence grows impatient. "Hey, Koki!" says the Absolute Beanpole. "Are they players?" His arms are lazed around the tips of the wires as though he holds barrels in them, and he's content like that, just hanging there. But impatient. His skin is most charcoal black and he knows we are players and I can see it in his peculiar expression that he'd like very much to eat us.

"Hang on, Huck, yeah?" Now Koki turns to me. His frustration is rival, but I think it'll let go a little more easily. He _was_ a taciturn man you could pry yourself out of. He says to me, "I wonder where you get the authority to say that?" and doesn't really mean it.

I tell him it's not authority, just decency, that civil people, even ones with such dashing rib-laced jackets, don't beat each other up in the middle of the street, out of pure decency. I wonder how much time I can buy before Akane comes back to herself and realizes that the great irony of contemplating survival is that you start to lose it. I hazard a glance back and at least she's on her own feet, leaning against the shop, shaking a bit, and only fifteen years old. The other two vanished, as I told them to, or wanted to tell them, and they press their faces to the glass behind the fog of the shop panes. Akane's eyes are on me, and so are Koki's and the Absolute Beanpole's, and his warily so.

Our reaper sighs, though it's genuine. "I'm afraid I can't do that, yeah? It's a rough world, yeah?" he says. "Huck!" To his partner. "You gonna get over here or what? Got to players ready for erasin', don't you think?"

The A.B. whistles between his teeth, and puffs out his cigar. He rides a thumb up and down the embroidered white lines of his open blazer facing. "If my eyes were not deceiving me, Koki, I'd say those players look awful something like girls," he says.

"If you have trouble hitting girls, you really shouldn't bother," I offer. The underworld laughs back.

"You misunderstand," says Koki. "Girls are double points."

There's a loud _shit! _and the sound of flesh on asphalt. It's not mine, though my own nerves can't verify; looking towards the source of the rumble shows Akane on her knees before a see-through wall that just severed her off from reaching the Scramble.

In a second, the A.B. is hovering over her like a grandfather clock.

"I say, you must be the rudest player I've ever contested with," he says, his voice lost somewhere in all the tobacco smoke. "We haven't even gotten past formalities." A.B. lodges a leathered heel into her stomach. I bark out in protest, but two strong forceps are under my shoulders and holding me back before I can so much as take a step. "I don't know, that _was_ pretty rude, yeah? Can't have you intercepting punishment, yeah?" Akane looks terrified, though more so like she's going to vomit.

"Allow me to introduce myself," says the A.B. "I 'low it doesn't much count since you'll soon be dead anyway, but they call me a Mr. _Huck Harvestman_. That's Mr. Harvestman to you."

"Just 'Mr. H.' was taken," says Koki.

"And you, little lady? Do you have a name?" Another kick in the gut that's sharp as a bullet. I almost think she does vomit from where I'm standing, little bits of bile and chunks dribbling from the corners of her shambling mouth. I am too petrified to struggle until this point, when I see this, when I start to squirm again. "I said, do you have a name?"

She manages to sputter her words. "…It's fucking—…" Another blow. "It's fucking…" Blow. "Akane, dickhead—…" Blow. "That's Ms. Akane to you. Bitch." Blow. Now there's blood starting to dribble.

"Absolutely the rudest language! I say, Koki, we definitely kill this one first for sure." Normally it's 'erased,' but this time it's 'killing,' I notice. Mr. Huck Harvestman wants much more than to simply dissolve her into pixie dust. With a wave of his bony fingers, there rise from the urban depths a swing shark and at least a hundred leaping bigbanfrogs. I feel Koki grumbling to himself; death is not his specialty. "Huck says if I play for ramen, it'll take my mind off things," as he'll later tell me, still a vestigial organ to the city.

"No," Akane whispers, for that's all she can whisper. I crick my neck and sink a set of teeth into my captor's hand, which buys me the second to flutter out of his hold. "Ow, not cool, yeah?"

"Akane! Stay calm, okay?! I'm coming!" I say, dodging stray tadpoles which breach the sordid air like sparkling gnats.

"I don't want to die," she says.

Mr. Huck Harvestman has taken a step back, choosing to huff again on that flaking cigar. It'd take me only so many certain leaps to reach her, hover over her and wipe her stinking wet cheeks with the corners of my dress. But I slip on the wet sand of the pavement and my legs hurdle under my hips and my hips under my shoulders and I've skidded and smeared tar-red scrapes on at least five elbows.

There's a flash of gleaming, navy blue, and the shark is up in the air with every last one of its teeth filed to hatred's point and aimed like sniper rifles in my partner's direction. I only see her look up one last second before the world is veiled in dorsal fins and the great belly of the beast exposes itself to the sunlight, perfect porcelain, pure and wet by some digital magic.

I have ten minutes to live without a partner. I think I wouldn't mind so much, but then there's that Gamemaster. I'd hate to let him win whatever game it is we're playing, the thought of it makes me writhe, because never in my life had I ever played a game with someone, or had something _left_ to do. Letting him score an ace was out of the question. So I get up on all those bruised joints of mine and make a mad dash for wherever the shark is landing. I won't make it in time, I couldn't, but I scream a little inside because that seems like the thing people do when they're being assaulted by sharks like this. Unknown frog legs plant stinging kisses on all parts of my body, and for a second I see her, Akane, my wonderful whore Akane, getting torn into bloody pieces by a shark the size of all her life, chest cracked open and exposing the last beats of a human heart to the whole world like the syrupy meat of a broken eggshell.

But I only saw it. There's a falter in the atmosphere, then, all of the sudden, and an explosive _bang_ roars out and something hot and metal trips through the pot of the white fish and draws a line of ichor.

Bang. Bang. More shots make more pin holes in sharkflesh. It roars something distorted and collapses accidentally into the earth with a splash.

"Chiyo!" I stop in my tracks and pivot around to see the ancient grinning cheekily and still holding the smoking guns in the air. "The hell have you been?"

"Sorry for the wait! Leave it to us, girls!" Takeshi barrels towards Kariya and has him down in one motion, one scrawny, pale, death-metal-dressed kid on top of another, while the twin heads of Chiyo's pistols are staring down Harvestman. The dark reaper only laughs in the face of the challenge, and all four disappear in a flash of bright light to the noise plane, leaving us with the visage of a noise shark which, too, taking its injuries, vanishes entirely.

Zak is still inside. Marjoram has remained in the shop since we first walked through the door, probably still in that smug plush seat of hers and still screwing us over. There are frogs hopping confusedly around.

But then they go away. All at once. As though something sliced through them.

"Hey." It's not much, but I say hey and ask Akane how she's doing, and maybe if she wants to get some ramen once the wall goes down. And I really worry about the metal kid and the old lady, however late she might have been, but I help my own partner up just for now, and she says yes to the ramen and I feel just a little bit better.

I buy a hat that day. Not now, but later, after we wait for five minutes and Akane gets all racked up and we decide to just take the long way around to get her away from it all. A baseball cap, maroon, with some designer logo embroidered between the eyelets, from Molco. I wear my hair down loose underneath it. Akane buys a notepad, and spends the walk calling every player and drawing out a list of all the day's survivors. Our special pair does not pick up, nor do they text back.

"Shit. It's all my fault. Damn it, damn it, damn it! If I hadn't been so stupid! Those two are dead because of me!" I wonder how long it takes a frustrated teen to go bald solely based on ripping out hair. Getting a long, sideways look at her, I realize Akane's left eye is half bare of eyelashes. They have a word for that.

"Listen, you didn't do anything wrong, okay?" I crept a hand on her shoulder and kept it there. "Chiyo was the one who wanted to go to that place and Chiyo was the one who went out there guns blazing and took the reapers on. How could anyone have known the harriers would show up?"

I might've, myself. It could be my fault. If the GM sent them.

"You almost fucking _died!_"

"I wouldn't have minded so much."

"But what was _I _supposed to do if you died? _I'd be dead too, you know! _Don't just brush it off!" I guess that's the moment I started to hate her, though I even then wasn't sure what real hatred is like.

Nor do I remember my first reaction upon seeing the strangest thing in the world a few seconds later. Confusion, maybe. Excitement. Baseball. The strangest thing in the world is a few stories high, a gleaming copper lighthouse taking up four fifths of the Dogenzaka main street and made entirely out of garbage.

"That the actual fuck?!" Akane seems to forget her misery for a moment.

"It's a pile of garbage."

"I can _see_ that, dumb bitch. Where the fuck did it come from? The garbage man miss or something?"

"I don't think so." I can wager only one guess and that one's not it. The Realground pedestrians walk right through it. But I don't tell her what I know, because I like to think of it as my secret, and she owes me enough already. "Take my stuff. I'll meet you inside." I hold my bag by the strap out for her and she grabs onto it and slings it around herself.

"You're not seriously…?"

"I bet those other girls are still inside. The purple one and her whiny sidekick? Talk to them."

This is good enough reasoning, apparently, but I wink at this chick just to make extra sure. She turns away from me in a mollified daze and heads towards the Ramen-Don door. "Order me whatever looks good!" I call after.

Which leaves me with the pile of crap and my baseball cap and this box of old junk outside the vintage clothing place next door. I briefly consider this whole pile of garbage being a trap, maybe hiding a bomb or something like _that _was what was meant to kill me, but think better of it. When the harrier said this guy was eccentric, I imagine the whole garbage-heap thing came as part of that package. So I'm not worried as my hands rifle through the discarded junk pile under the glowing neon face of the Cosmic Corner and pull out an empty lava lamp with the plastic slightly dented. There's a spot just between where the hood of a car juts out and a rusted stop sign bends in a spiral, in the dark side of the moon where the sun doesn't strike (and more importantly, out of Ramen-Don eyeshot), where this would fit perfectly as a foothold.

"There," I say, twisting the silver top of the thing so it tucks in just right. "That's my contribution." It looked nice, too, if just for that second. I lift my foot up and get some traction on top of a tire, gripping the lamp to steady myself, and prepare to climb to the top to get the cat's view of the place.

My eyes remain level. I'm looking at the little niches between the trash and it fascinates me. One hand searches around for the next handle above to grab onto, while the second keeps me from falling. So far, I don't find much success, and consider perhaps retreating and trying up a different side. Flat, flat. The backside of a refrigerator, a crusted old license place, a warm hand.

I do remember my first reaction then. It was fear, fear of being dangled in the air – I wasn't afraid of heights, though I did want to keep my legs in tact – and the second one was pain, because his hand might be twice the size of mine and bends my wrist backwards like a toothpick and smashes my helpless fingers together. The third one, though, was that familiarly strange excitement of lust, adventure lust, because I had been right and if he doesn't kill me I could make it to the top, but body lust too because I realized he was smart and he was gorgeous and he was crushing _my_ hand.

"Hello," I remember I said. It started to drizzle.

"Stupid radar graph," he says, looking disinterestedly at my wriggling hand as though it were a cockroach. His eyes are a shining umbrella yellow.

"That's me, yup. Is this yours?"

"It didn't work." He begins to twist my wrist.

"Ow – ow – please stop. Or let me up. But mostly stop."

Twist squeeze crack. "You should be zetta erased by now."

Splinters. "If you want a job done – ow – do it yourself. Alternatively let go of me." Which wasn't what I wanted _really_, just for the pain to stop, but he does so obediently, and I crash onto the bottom rungs of the garbage pile, my tail landing straight on a burnt out television. There's his laughter and the click of a gun and he leaps like a spider monkey in urban threads with a crunch on the metal and aims it straight at my third eye.

"Damn straight. Know what I want, zero? Know what my dream is?"

I'm looking up at him and he down on me, and the clouding over sky starts dropping a little heavier so that the _water _drips down and into my eyes and occasionally blinds me from really examining him, strange scars and tan and smirk in all.

"What?" I ask him.

This he says through the megaphone. "To reach infinity!" I realize megaphones were never intended for use five feet away. "You're looking at the next Composer of Shibuya. And I won't let a radian stop me!"

I wasn't sure what the Composer meant, then, not yet. But it sounded important, so I agree with him. "Yeah?" I tell him. "Go for it. Just look out for yourself, though, alright?" I don't know why I said it. Maybe it was Akane who made me. Or Chiyo. I realize she stayed back in the shop to keep her friend from knowing she wasn't alive. We might have paid for it – we didn't, but we might have. The look I get from the gamemaster is one of confusion. I think he was looking for a brawl, perhaps, but I'm not the type willing to give it. I might describe his features as softening, then, but my imagination is likely just acting hopeful. So I say, "I'll look out for you too.

"Nobody's looking out for me," I say, "but I'll give you my extra. Now you've got two, right? With me looking after you, and you looking after you, and the both of us looking after you, I'm sure you can manage, Mr. Composer… Ah…"

"Minamimoto Sho. And don't forget it, digit." The gun became a hand that's reaching for me. I take it and hope to hold onto it for life but he shakes himself out of the gesture immediately and starts walking away.

He stops. "You messed up my equation. Everything in that pile was angled to perfection."

"I'm sorry. I just wanted to help."

"Ever heard of feng shui?"

"Feng shui—like, the house thing where you put certain stuff in places for good luck?"

"It's something like that." Sho picks up his speed again, and I can only stumble after.

"I'm sorry," I manage. The rain picks up to a dull lion's roar and splashes off the street in tiny wet fireworks. I shout this to him as he continues to increase the distance between us. "I'm sorry."

"Go to hell."

I go to Ramen-Don instead when he's gone. Akane and the rest of them are still busy chatting over the last of dishes, and they save me one; it's boxed up and in a bag thrown hastily to the saved booth seat by the window. They all remark on how soaked I am and what I was doing out there and why didn't I come inside, but I don't say anything for a long while.

* * *

**AN: And nobody did homework that night. Jesus Christ.**


	5. What Happened at the Zoo

Akane was content to parade the grounds with the other girls and at my behest left me to my own devices. I had wandered inexplicably towards the West Exit Bus Terminal in relative peace and hoped to find a moment alone.

Marjoram caught me. She appeared from no where, seemingly, as if she had been quietly stalking behind in the shadows and now took the second to stride out and casually seat herself next to me. We're propped up in front of Hachiko, she and I, one next to the other, not speaking to each other but both staring forward, she with a catty, informal air of the well-trained child and I with a cruel imitation of such. Standing, her bushy mane would about reach my shoulder: a dull, organic indigo, home-sink dyed. The sun melts away from us, like the touched daisy yolk of an egg on the bottom of a spoon. No mail, no walls, no time limit. Not all day. I sneak a sidelong glance at the kid. She's much too doilied up for this weather, done all the way thick with a high lace collar and heavy peasant skirt. She wears witch's boots, the kind with brass rounds and laces running at the front. Her face is doughy with two bright hibiscus circles which flicker like stained glass.

"The two survived." Her voice is the last sip of soft coffee.

"Chiyo and Takashi?"

"Reapers can't attack directly until Day 7. They fought off some noise and ran."

I feel a wash of relief knowing nobody got themselves killed looking out for me. I don't ask where Marjoram was or what she was doing during all of this, for fear of conflict; I do ask if she wants to grab a bite from Sunshine Burger because the sitting and staring into space makes me uncomfortable and she makes me uncomfortable and this is what I had been taught to do in the living world. I'm on my feet and idly wandering, feigning interest in the scenery.

"I know you," says Marjoram, not moving in the slightest. The flare gun of her look catches me off guard. It's in sharp and dry monotone like the rest of her. She is the dark meat of a rabbit. I have never seen the girl in my life before this week. I knew most people at school, not deeply, but by face, with the nonchalant reconnaissance of the writer, and this alien Polaroid wasn't one of them.

"From school?" I say. Some sort of lying question will do, to keep her on a mistaken tangent.

"Was it a building?" Marjoram thinks aloud. "You seem unaffected by heights, if the Towa Records incident is any indication. A pill, perhaps. Or many of them. A rope? A car. A river."

"A tree, a bee, the rain, a train, a boat, a goat, a house, a mouse, a box, a fox," I tell her. "The hell are we talking about?"

"We didn't go like the rest of them." Leaning forward, she is not hostile, rather alight with interest, when she says, "Personally, I bypassed the circuit, doused myself in the tub and let the hairdryer do its thing. You were _depressed_. So what did you do?"

I understand. "Mm, suicide-wise, huh." We were nothing tragic; in this hen-picked Underground assortment of premature cases - a few car crashes here, a hint of leukemia, maybe a mugging – we were just two dumb broads who'd done it our own way. Suicide-wise, huh. Somehow in the panoply of untimely demise, she had singled me out as a conspirator with the sympathetic scope of psychiatrists' wet dreams.

"Want to go to Sunshine Burger?" she says.

The glossy joint is a stone's throw away from Hachiko's oasis, part of a strip mall with a few contemporary shops. Pay at the counter. Old fashioned American diner style. There's a window table, just two chairs, where the tired waitress brings our burgers, and where I tell the rabbit it was hypothermia.

"Dad owned a butcher shop," I say; "I guess I walked into the cold storage one day and never came out."

She gasps, "They found you like that? Just faded away?" Two fireworks on that troublesome face.

I poke around at my fries. "Why you so interested, anyway?"

"I think it's _gorgeous_. Beautiful thing, the despair." It's said with two capitals. _The Despair. _"Just look at it. Just look at the _sound_ of it. Look at the word." Marjoram whispers, "Nobody else gets it. Only us. No one else has felt the pain we've felt. I knew you get it when I saw you, like… like I looked at you and I just knew. You get it. I know you."

"I'm not sure I want to get it."

She simpers a little bit, a small smile into her milkshake, which is stirred with an idle child's hand. I take a breath and wait a second.

"You really electrocuted yourself?" Which makes her beam a little broader. She says yeah like no big deal, we're talking a world record. She asks how I managed my own death. She remarks on how it was so marvelously inefficient. Pillar. Why not bullets, she asks. Highest fatality rate out there.

"Why not bullets yourself," I say, which gets her giggling.

"But seriously, you're looking at, what, upwards of several hours. That's stupid. No bullets, huh?"

"I walked in there and it was like falling asleep." I pull out my phone and start scrolling through, trying to look absent-minded but with too much conscience in every keystroke. It's not having access to a cell or being a teenager; it's looking down and thumbing plastic.

"Those bitches at school gave me such a rough time." She's still prattling. Glancing up, I realize to my chagrin Marjoram has not folded into herself and disappeared, as I would have liked. "You know the kind. I used to go home, my mom had this leftover artist's paper, draw pictures of holes in the ground, filled with their bodies, falling. I'd make them angels in the sky, burning through their wings, dropping into a deep lake of sweat that goes on forever." She takes a joke of a bite out of that sandwich, which has sat limply and patiently on the cold white plate, and nods at me, remembering fondly, before she starts again. I knew those girls, the type of which she was speaking, because they were my posse, the queens to which I played happy sycophant. I didn't dislike them, though I wasn't much interested in their well-being, either. They taught me how not to drown and that was enough. To fall from the sky boiling seemed too dangerous and too involved. Living well and caring little was best and easiest defense.

All this, and I don't hazard to look at her. Marjoram sighs. "I hated them so much. I suppose it doesn't matter now, though. I got out, right? Home free. Whom are you texting?"

I've really only been looking at my list of contacts, a sad motley of characters I would never message first; mostly the kinds of girls Marjoram hated so much, few boys, no Dad (never got into the whole "cell phone" craze). Akane's number is on there, too, untouched, pristine and terrifying. She'd said it was _fucking obvious_ we sync up and keep in touch on the first day. So "A friend," I lie, and stupidly click a few more buttons for good measure.

"Oh." This is sufficient; she's back into her drink again. She actually sips this time, a dangerous feat for the slender girl.

"You know, it's the strangest thing." Now she fidgets again, sighs. "I hated all those people." Marjoram takes a cold long look at me. "I still do, well—but—I want to, to still do. I hate them! But it's like I can't find the motivation now. There's nothing behind it." This part of her comes out slightly terrified, and when she is scared so become I: "Do you think it's because I'm dead? That I've escaped them? Maybe that's why I don't care so much anymore?"

"Did you give it up as an entry fee?" I ask.

Marjoram slaps her fist on the shabby plastic table with the impact of a skipping stone. I think she's really taken a liking to me to act out this much. "That must be it," she says, and her face does that thing where it sets on fire a bit. Again, "That must be it. I gave up my hatred of all those who tormented me. A fitting end." Though she looks a bit somber.

"Glad it helped you. I still haven't figured out my own yet." Which is true; the first day found me rummaging through the list of what was valuable to me. Material possessions, not likely. There were some clothes I liked but not enough to sacrifice them. I could still swing a bat. I didn't have much in the looks department; though I liked my hair, a dull auburn and almost down to the stomach, I only woke up dead, not bald, so that was off the list. What was it I had that was most valuable? My father? Surely it would haunt me, but I couldn't notice if he disappeared.

"Maybe it has to do with your following the Game Master around. Like you were asexual but you lost it."

I laugh out of a rancid embarrassment which swells up in my stomach. "'Following the Game Master?' How do you know about that?"

"Everybody knows about that."

"Oh."

"Do you love him?"

I look at her strangely, a guilty sister, a shipwreck victim, a gasp reflex. Zero mobility. That's all.

"How stupid." When we talk about love, Marjoram acquires that condescending drawl, retracts into her safety shell, and returns to stirring the full half of her vanilla milkshake.

My phone has settled on the message inbox. Of course there's the clearance conversations with friends, the worthless abbreviated pleasantries, and the occasional, unanswered, frantic check-up from Akane. But there's also the mission mail. I open it again, the whole archive, and scroll through the entries. The sender name is garbled, a glitched trick of the Reaper's Game, perhaps. But the reply button is operative.

"Let's talk about _The Despair_ again," urges Marjoram. She's grown desperate and antsy, tugging at her mother's skirt, having reached at the holy grail but not quite having grasped it, and asks me impatiently where I got it. The _Despair._

I purse my lips. Of course it's a hard question to start with, and of course I'm more concerned with my phone after discovering the vast wealth of opportunity flashed so pleasantly on the four-inch screen. I am casually disinterested, but not inept; one learns from the girls you only get one chance at these sorts of things, and Sho was a man of eclectic wired patterns. But I had to keep Marjoram interested, so I juggle the two of them at once.

"My dad and I played baseball." I finger a french fry into my mouth. That's enough to start.

"Pardon?"

"Mostly on weekends, we'd take his old pickup truck and drive out to the school baseball field. Not our school's, but the one over. My girlfriends weren't into sports, and they wouldn't want to see me doing something like that. Didn't play on the team. Anyway, he'd pitch and I'd bat, and then we'd switch. This went on for hours. We brought a bunch of balls because there were only the two of us, and at the end we'd go pick them all up from where they were scattered on the outfield. I used to try to play as the whole fielding team, first pitching and then catching the grounders – they were always grounders, because my dad wasn't very good. He got a little better eventually. He started practicing because he thought I was upset with him for not putting out a very good game. Or he was upset. 'I'm sorry, Bee, I'm just not too good at this.' That's just the sort of person he was. Then we'd get lunch. There was a subs place nearby. It was special, because since we drove out to get to the separate field, we'd only get the subs when we went to play on the weekends.

"My dad liked to get this big Italian sub, with lots of meats and several kinds of cheeses. I never knew what it was called, but it looked too big to fit in one's mouth. He'd offer to share it, but I didn't think I'd like it. He told me that sandwich was the kind that puts hair on your chest. He got the same sandwich every time. I was scared of getting hair on my chest, so I'd get ham and cheese. He'd ask me, 'Bee, what do you want to be when you grow up?' and I'd tell him a baseball player. I got good at telling him I wanted to be a baseball player. He'd get me those card packs of the NPB players, and I learned their names and what positions they played, and when they got traded and my dad was upset, I'd try to get upset too. I was good at that, wearing an upset face. He'd recommend me to all the local leagues, amateur school kind of stuff, y'know, because he thought I had a real panache for baseball, and he said whatever I wanted to be I could do it, and he'd help pay for it, for the college and all that.

"And I told him baseball player because that's what he wanted to be when he grew up, but the truth is neither of us were very good at it. He worked as a butcher sometimes, and a dog groomer others, which people always thought was funny, that he worked with animals so much, like grooming the meat and then eating it, but I never understood it, because people don't eat dogs, people eat cattle and pork and poultry. I used to say that I wanted to do that too, work in a meat shop, because it seemed important to me at the time. I didn't want to groom dogs because I didn't like them. But then Mom left and Dad said, 'What do you want to be when you grow up, Bee,' because I was the princess and whatever I wanted the two of us were going to work for it, I saw the despondent look of that striped dress shirt he always wore, a dull grandfather-blue-and-white stripe, just the dress shirt - I didn't look at his eyes - so I told him a baseball player. He'd watch the NPB on TV sometimes and once or twice I looked through his old primary school pictures, weathered ones he was most proud of – and it was a baseball player. But then he said, 'I'm sorry, Bee, I'm just not too good at this,' and that's the thing, too – neither of us were very good at it."

When I stop, Marjoram blinks dumbly at me for a few seconds before blurting out an aptly timed, "What the hell?" I've never told that story and clearly I need to work on it, because for once in her life Marjoram has lost that stoic façade.

"That's how I got _The Despair,_" I clarify.

"Yes, but, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Who cares that you collected trading cards or ate sandwiches or, or, _anything? _You just dropped that, that bombshell, that freaking moon, on this conversation and none of it makes any sense. No childhood traumas, no emotional turmoil, just—"

"—Just baseball. But say that again."

Furrowed girlish eyebrows. "'No emotional turmoil'?"

"No, before that." I'm grinning like the devil. I've thought of a message, something unflinchingly meaningless but just mad enough to be mistaken as fodder for the philosophical imagination.

"You dropped the freaking moon?"

"Any tree can drop an apple…" My fingers run laps around the phone keys, jotting this in. "I'll drop the freaking _moon!_"

Poor Marjoram. She has become helpless, a dark rabbit caught in the spotlight. She, the unwilling soundboard for my fantasies, is still chewing on the last _moon_ I dropped, and is so overloaded by this point that I continue to make no sense to her. The send button is my accomplice, chirruping faithfully in time to the clattering of the keys and warming up to my touch, which sends a pleasant mail icon across the screen with a loading bar. SMS is my goddess.

"Those fries weren't_ drugged_, were they?" I allow they could have been. I'm careless enough. But I don't particularly mind.

"What if my entry fee was my inhibition?" I cry. "Like maybe in life I didn't have the courage to feel really, I don't know, excited about stuff, but now I can, because I'm really excited?!"

Marjoram is a scowling stone adorning a gravesite. "I think you're just hyper," she says. "Were you texting your boyfriend? Is that what's causing this?"

"Yes! No. He's not my boyfriend, Marge." I understand the pride of the bluet, in being small and tender, with four points to collapse into itself and dry up into frailty, while at once feeling the real, deep, clandestine flush of liveliness. It was a secret and quiet happiness to be kept indoors or beneath a dry umbrella.

"Don't call me that. Where are you going?" I twirl around in the center aisle, to the mild amusement of some evening diners, and hang on the frame of the door.

"Out, Marge." The windows show a healthy pane of young nighttime sky. There's a sweet hum from my satchel and the low, unnatural thump of some popstar tone. I rifle through the bag and flip open the cell.

A response:

"That an inside joke?"

I leave him on a playful note:

"Ours!"


End file.
